Alan Watts

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957) and The Book (1966).

The wisdom of insecurity

Alan Watts teaches that the search for security is the very thing that makes people feel insecure. Life is a flowing process, and to try to fix it, to hold on to a person, a belief or a self, is like holding the breath: one loses it by trying to keep it. The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity, he says, are the same thing. Security comes only from accepting insecurity fully, as a swimmer who stops struggling finds that the water holds them up.

Only the present

Memory and expectation are both present experiences: the past and the future exist only as what we remember and imagine now. A person who lives for the future, he observes, never arrives, since when the future comes it is the present and they are already looking past it. Words deepen the trap. We come to live among names and plans as if they were the things themselves, like a diner eating the menu instead of the meal. The cure is not a new belief but attention to what is actually here.

No separate experiencer

When a person feels pain, they feel that there is the pain and also someone who has it and wants it gone. Watts asks them to look for that someone. There is no I apart from the experience, no thinker apart from the thought: the attempt to stand outside one's feelings and manage them is a split in the mind, and the split is what turns pain into torment and fear into panic. When it is seen that the experiencer is the experience, the struggle stops, and what remains is simply what is felt.

The skin-encapsulated ego

The Book names what he takes to be the great illusion of the West: that each person is a separate ego in a bag of skin, a stranger in an alien world. This sense of self is a social fiction, taught to children, and the questioning of it is a taboo. We do not come into this world, Watts says; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. Just as an apple tree apples, the earth peoples: a person is something the whole universe is doing in this place, as a wave is something the whole ocean is doing.

The game of hide and seek

For the meaning of it all he turns to the Hindu picture of the world as God's play, lila. The Godhead plays hide and seek with itself: it pretends to be all the separate beings, forgets that it is pretending so that the game may be real, and finds itself again in the moment of awakening. He sets this dramatic picture beside two others he thinks have ruled the West: the ceramic picture, in which a maker shapes the world as a potter shapes clay and stands outside it, and the fully automatic picture, in which the world is a mindless machine and life an accident within it.

Opposites go together

Opposites, he teaches, belong together. Front and back, up and down, pleasure and pain, life and death are not enemies but the two ends of one thing, and neither can be without the other, as there is no inside without an outside. The Chinese figure of yin and yang shows it, each holding the seed of the other. To want only one pole, pleasure without pain or life without death, is to want a stick with only one end.

Zen and spontaneity

The Way of Zen traces Zen to its Taoist roots: wu wei, not forcing, acting with the grain of things; and tzu-jan, the of-itself-so, the way things happen without being pushed. Awakening, in his account, is not the gaining of a new state but the seeing that the mind which grasps after awakening is itself the obstacle. One cannot try to be spontaneous, since the effort defeats itself. He loved the old verse in which, sitting quietly and doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

In his essay on Beat Zen and Square Zen he warns against two mistakes. Beat Zen uses Zen to excuse doing as one pleases; Square Zen turns it into a rigid discipline, a hierarchy and a certificate of awakening. The Zen beyond both seeks nothing and needs no justification.

Liberation as therapy

In Psychotherapy East and West he holds that the Eastern ways of liberation, Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism, are closer to Western psychotherapy than to Western religion or philosophy. Both work to free a person from conventions of society that have been mistaken for nature: the fixed sense of self, the rules of the social game, the double binds of being told to be spontaneous or to love on command. The guru, like a good therapist, plays a counter-game that leads the student to see through the trap for themselves.

Listening

His own counsel for meditation is simple. Sit comfortably, close the eyes and listen to the sounds around, without naming them or trying to place them, as one listens to music; let the chatter of thought be heard too, as noise in the head, without following it; and let the breath come and go by itself. The point is not to reach a special state but to stop interfering, and to notice that the listener cannot be found apart from what is heard.

Of the drugs he once wrote about, he came to say that once the message is received one should hang up the phone. The house adds that they are unlawful in most places and risky in themselves, and nothing here is a guide to them.